Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Tahitian Treat Fruit Punch

Imagine you're on a subway platform and a big, scary looking dude starts cursing at you and shaking his fists. It's definitely you he's talking to, it's 3am and no one else is around. Then he dashes up the steps and you're all "There ain't no way he's coming over here" but he does. The menacing guy stomps down the steps, looking mean as hell, walks up to you, reaches into his jacket like he's going for a gun, then pulls out a twenty dollar bill and gives it to you. "Enjoy this, young man", says he and leaves.

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Man, there are a lot of veiled assumptions in this soft drink review. And a couple of assumptions that rip the veil right off and are like, "HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW!!!"

The review makes it sound as if you expected to be mauled by this soft drink, and instead were extremely pleasantly surprised. I do not know why you believed either of those things: the can is plainly labeled, "Tahitian Treat." Treats are pleasant, and Tahiti is by all accounts a nice place. It is not like the can says, "Magnitogorsk Maiming."

I particularly like that can describes the drink as containing "naturally and artificially flavored soda." To the untrained eye, this would appear to cover the full spectrum of ways in which a soda can be flavored: either without the help of artifice, or with the help of artifice.

Yet to the eye that has brains, a paradox emerges: they could have written "flavored soda" and conveyed the same message, but they chose not to do so.

This means something.

This means that there's a third option, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to list the two ways they flavored the soda. We know that there is artificially flavored soda.... Naturally flavored soda . . . And now we know there is something else... something beyond these two... Supernaturally flavored soda.

Wow, I just had to throw myself back in my chair writing that. That is how powerful this idea is.

Seriously, check this out: like a really classy Lovecraft story, this soda can appears to be perfectly mundane, but a small detail hints at some nigh-unthinkable layer of reality--while reassuring you that, never fear, you can still go on drinking your "naturally & artificially flavored soda."

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.